Portable sound recording devices are well known. For many years, very compact portable tape recorders have been available in a size which fits comfortably in the palm of the user's hand. These portable recorders are used to record spoken words or other sounds in analog form on removable magnetic tape cassettes. Subsequently, palm-size digital audio tape recorders were introduced, and still more recently, compact devices which record digitized sound signals on embedded or removable solid state recording media have come on the market.
Many of the known compact recorders provide basic functions such as record, stop, play, rewind and fast forward. To permit a user to selectively actuate these functions, a number of manually operable switches are typically provided on the housing of the recorder.
It would be desirable to provide additional functions in a compact sound recorder without increasing the number of switches, since adding further switches tends to increase the cost of manufacturing the recorder, and may also require the size of the recorder to be increased.